Telecommunications service providers continually increase the number of services and products they offer to customers. As competition increases, service providers must provide an increased level of support for these services while keeping costs down.
In conventional support systems, a service provider may use a system integrator to develop solutions that tie together multi-vendor hardware systems. The system integrator typically uses a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software package to integrate the various hardware systems.
One problem with using COTS software to integrate multi-vendor hardware systems is that the selected software is often incompatible with all of the existing hardware systems. In this case, the service provider is often forced to replace legacy systems (i.e., existing systems) in order to maintain full functionality.
Another problem with using COTS software to integrate multi-vendor hardware systems is that the selected software package often does not include pre-packaged modules that permit the software to communicate with various hardware platforms. This may cause the system integrator to exclude one or more hardware platforms from the support system.